Sorry about no new posts…thinking something to do with Imitrex has made me pretty sick and I haven’t even felt like getting up, much less post anything.
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Ok, to hell with that earlier whining. Here’s something you nerds ought to enjoy. I settled for an associate’s level in electronics, preferring to focus on optics/physics, so forgive me if I don’t get too hot-n-heavy with terminology.
The folks at Science Daily have put a really cool article out on a fourth type of electronic device. For the last two hundred years we’ve known about resistors and over time gone on to do funtastic things with capacitors and inductors. All are devices that have either pure impedance (resistor has a time-invariant resistance) or some kind of impedance based on phase changes to current (complex impedance). Some guy who believes in electronics heavily and makes or made a living based on that lie (that electrons really exist) will pick that last sentence apart – I don’t care.
In fact, it seems that some of the Brains who Believe in Lies (BBL’s, pronounced “bubbles”) have been observing some of these effects for decades, but didn’t understand it. I think McGoo’s Coypu chap has been secretly working in the background to suppress this knowledge. I tell you, the man has an agenda.
So these HP BBL’s guys have come up with a device that changes it’s resistance as a function of voltage applied to it in the past. It is a passive device (and will be described in terms of the unit Ohms). Which means, boys and girls, if they make enough of these things on one chip, you now will be able to boot your ‘puter’s OS only once (well, not if it is Windows)… and it will require no power unless you need to read or reset a bit. It may very well be “instant on” computing.
RSC has a great article on more of the nuts-n-bolts.
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Turns out when I was reading about Cindy McCain refusing to give out her tax returns, I began to think…”Hey, who did start this rather invasive practice of pressuring candidates what their tax returns were?”
I was gratified to find that the answer came from a place I was familiar with – Captains Quarters.
I for one would much rather see a presidential election run like a job interview. You fly someone in or they drop on by, you grill them a while, they give a presentation, a few phone interviews sprinkled in there for good measure.
But this idea of showing tax returns so everybody can see how much you donated to charity (which *really* has me wondering in one instance), how much you deducted, and how much you made.
Look, if someone asks me what I make in a year, I tell them to go to hell. Why should a presidential candidate not be able to?
If I make a legal living and file a legal tax return, the matter ends there.
Lemur King's Folly 